I am becoming an ICT nerd.

I've been having a busy few days exploring some new online applications that I hope will be useful in my everyday life.

First, I signed up for LibraryThing. Do you use LibraryThing? I'd heard of it, but I didn't really know what it was. Then when I visited The University of Technology Sydney's library for my study visit, one of the presentations was about using social networking in the library. They mentioned Facebook, Twitter, and LibraryThing. So I thought I'd give it a try.

LibraryThing is pretty fun! I've started adding books to "My Library", and you'll notice on my blog sidebar I have a LibraryThing widget. If you click on any of the covers, it will open up a window with a catalogue record of the book, including my rating and review if I've written a review. Cool huh!?

Second, I decided that I'd have a go of Evernote. I blogged a little bit about it here, and I decided to take the plunge and try it out.

So far, I LOVE IT!!!

For my MEd, I have to construct a portfolio which contains a critical evaluation of my learning during the course and an assessment of how this learning will enable me to be an effective teacher librarian in the future. I'm going to need to collect a lot of information to write an excellent portfolio, so I've decided to use Evernote to facilitate this process.

Here's a screen shot of my Evernote window:

On the right hand side is the "note" that I was most recently working on, which happens to be a text document. It's some ideas about what themes I will concentrate on when I'm writing my portfolio.

In the centre is a list of all the notes that I've made so far. On the left hand side is a toolbar for managing my "notebooks".

What is super fantastic about Evernote is the simplicity of doing anything that I want to do with just one or two clicks. I emailed my theme ideas for my portfolio to my supervisor straight from Evernote - no middleman needed! I also grabbed the screen shot that you see above in Evernote, right clicked on it and chose "picture" so I could import it straight into this post. And that leads me to my next discovery...

I get a lot of great information via Twitter. I follow quite a lot of librarians and teacher librarians, and I know that I'll be able to use lots of the links and information that they tweet in my portfolio. I needed to find an easy way to grab tweets that I like and store them in Evernote. And along came Seesmic.

Seesmic is a platform for Twitter so that you don't have to use the Twitter.com website to access your timeline. It has the excellent function that I can highlight a tweet, click the Evernote icon on my toolbar, and it sends a copy of the tweet as a "note" to my Evernote account. If the tweet contains a link to a website, when in Evernote I just double-click on the link and it takes me straight there! Sweet :)

Yes, it's been time-consuming to set up these new applications, and yes, I'm still learning how to get the best out of them. But I'm loving it!

Why I love Twitter

I've been using Twitter for over a month now, and I'm finding it to be an excellent source of information on just about anything! I choose to follow an eclectic mix of fellow bloggers, celebrities, journalists, librarians, educators and organisations. Everyone from Smoochiefrog to Audrey Nay to No Country for Young Women to the United Nations to Mia Freedman. Some tweets entertain me, some allow me to engage in a conversation, and some contain links to information that is relevant to my daily life as a mum, teacher and student of librarianship.

I've also changed the website bookmarking tool that I use; I'm now using delicious rather than the favourites tab on internet explorer. Why? Delicious uses "tags" to organise my bookmarks rather than folders. This allows for overlap; the fact that some websites fit into more than one category. Also, I've discovered packrati.us via Twitter, which automatically bookmarks the links in my tweets for me. There are a number of setting options, and I've chosen to make sure that anything that I retweet gets bookmarked. It's so easy! If a tweet comes through on my timeline with an interesting link, I retweet straight away. Not only am I passing on the link/information to my followers, I'm also automatically bookmarking the link for myself. Super!

The only problem that I'm having is keeping up with the flow of information! So far I'm following 111 tweeps, and I'm very careful about adding more and increasing the amount of information flowing my way! Here is a small selection from the vast amount of wonderful information relating to libraries, teacher librarians, using technology in learning, reading and publishing that I've collected so far. Of course I've found out a lot of other stuff too, but here I'm only including information that is particularly related to reading, learning and teaching.

Twitter4Librarians is a resource page designed to help librarians better use Twitter. I found it via @sandynay, who retweeted it from @infodivabronx.

Education and Second Life is a blog post by Judy at hey jude (@heyjudeonline on Twitter) that includes a video showing how Teen Second Life is being used in the classroom.

MAEVE Magazine is a free online magazine which sets out to provide an alternative to the mainstream women's mags. I found out about it via @JulesyParker who writes for MAEVE and blogs at Beautiful You.

Internet Safety is a blog post by Ruth at skerricks (@ruth_skerricks on Twitter) which discusses how to successfully teach students about internet safety and includes links to other articles and documents.

If you are a teacher or a librarian, or the mother of school age kids, you may find some of the above information interesting or useful. Even if you're not, I hope that this post inspires you to use Twitter to gather information that is meaningful to you.

Happy tweeting!

Do you read electronic books?

I've recently joined NetGalley. Publishers can share their digital galleys with professional readers (yes, I'm loving this title for what I do!) who can request galleys that they want to review.

I found out about NetGalley via Twitter, which really is an awesome source of all sorts of information. The first galley that I requested was Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt (published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Within 24 hours of my request, an advance reading copy (ARC) was available for me to download.

Because I don't have a portable ereader of any kind, I have to read the ARC on my computer using Adobe Digital Editions. It's great that I have the opportunity to read this, and it's wonderful that Digital Editions means that I can, but I've got to say, it's not the best. When I read a novel, it's recreation for me. When I sit at a desk and read the computer screen, it's work. So I'm having trouble enjoying the book the way I would be if it actually was a book. I can't just pick it up and put it down whenever I want to. And even though my computer is a laptop, so I can move it around and take it places, it's a pretty big, heavy laptop, and I can't really curl up with it.

So, do you read electronic books? Do you have a Kindle, or iPhone or iPad? How does the experience compare with an actual book?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

Twitter - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

3 days.

32 tweets.

Following 36.

14 followers.

I'm not exactly setting twitter on fire, but I've learnt a lot so far...

The Good

• It's fun!
• It's instant!
• You can "follow" celebrities!
• It's a wonderful source of information.

Expanding on that last point a bit, I want to share with you a couple of wonderful sources of information that I have found via twitter.

resourceshelf is a US website that collects all sorts of information of interest to information professionals, educators and journalists. They tweet links to each new resource that they list. I follow them, which means that I receive all their tweets. When something catches my eye, I click on the link to read more. If something is really interesting or useful, I "retweet", which means that I repeat the tweet to all my followers (who may not follow resourceshelf themselves). See how the information is passed on from twit to twit?

LISNews is also US based, and provides links to new posts about libraries and information science.

Getting away from the whole libraries/teachers/books theme, I also follow techreview, who tweet links to articles about the latest technology innovations. Recent posts include Glaucoma Test in a Contact Lens and Robotic Planes Chase After Climate Data.

Obviously, I have not even begun to plumb the depths of the information available to me via twitter.

The Bad

Unfortunately, I just can't seem to help myself from tweeting ridiculously boring details of my daily life! It's just so addictive, and I must admit I have been guilty of the following tweets:

• OMG just finished helping Alana with her homework!
• Devilled Sausages simmering in the Crock Pot for dinner tonight :)
• Yay! The Vampire Diaries is back on GO! tonight :)

Sorry, sorry, sorry!

The Ugly

There seems to be a whole slew of people that use their twitter account simply to generate as much traffic as possible to their website (for the purpose of making money). They tweet multiple times about a new product/great deal. Ugghh, who could stand to follow them and get repeat tweets about making money and winning things all day? Not me.

Now excuse me while I tweet a link to this post :)

PS. What are your experiences with twitter?

EER500 Up and Running

I study via distance education, which means that all my study materials and all my communication with teaching staff and other students is online. This semester, one of my subjects is EER500 "Introducation to Educational Research"; and though the semester doesn't begin until March 1st, the subject coordinator already has things up and running on the website. Bless you Beverley Moriarty!

I've been able to read through the subject outline, which goes into great detail about the study schedule for the subject, as well as the requirements for the assessment items. I've even been able to make a start! Hooray for enthusiastic subject coordinators that prepare early! The earlier I make a start, the less stressful the deadlines will be.

The main thrust of the subject is to prepare us to undertake our own educational research, from the point of view of both "how to" design a research question, and bigger research issues such as ethical issues and paradigms of research. It sounds fascinating to me, and I'm very eager to get started.

Our beginning point is to find a recent media release, government report, or similar, relating to an area of interest for us. Students studying this subject have many different areas of specialisation. Mine is librarianship, so I'll be looking for a report that relates to libraries in schools. I've got the idea that I'd like to focus on the implications of the Federal Government's Digital Education Revolution for school libraries and the teacher librarian's role. Wish me luck!  

More about the iphone and Books

Remember I was talking about e-readers and iphones the other day? Well check this out!

With thanks to Judy at Hey Jude!

The Kindle and Other e-book Readers

Christmas brings with it lots of catalogues and shopping, and I find, lots of ideas for things that I'd really like to have! Lately my mind has been on the idea of getting a new mobile phone, perhaps even an iphone. All the apps make it a one stop shop for phone, music, photos/video, internet and personal organisation. Not to mention, it has an e-reader.

My husband has been warning me that using your iphone for everything can cost a lot! Apparently the trick is to make sure that your internet access is via your own home network rather than charged as phone calls. Also, he reminds me that if you have one device for everything (i.e. all your eggs in one basket), then disaster strikes if something happens to that precious device. So I don't think I'm getting an iphone any time soon.

I am, though, quite taken with the idea of an e-reader. For uni this year, one of the readings was via an e-book which I borrowed from the uni library. First I had to install some software to act as my library, then I downloaded the book, and read it on screen. That's the sum total of my experience with e-books. But the idea of a small, portable device that can hold hundreds of books is enticing. Also, many e-books are available for free, and (I've heard) others are very cheap.

I have heard though, that Australian users can find it a bit frustrating because copyright prevents us from owning many of the e-books that are readily available elsewhere. Bummer.

My friend Ruth, at Skerricks has been lobbying (no success so far) to receive a Kindle, or similar, to review. Let me tell you, she deserves it. She loves her library, loves her kids, and works hard to continually improve service. She never rests on her laurels, but is always trying new things. She is ever the optimist, and seems tireless. Today she posted about e-readers here and provided a link to a very interesting blog post and slide show about e-readers and e-books in Australia. Check it out here.

Can't blog now, I'm supposed to be doing my assignment! But check this out LOL! I must have a look at http://www.booklistonline.com when I get the chance.

Trying Something Else!

If you're enjoying reading about my adventures with technology and how I'm experimenting with it, you might enjoy this.

Just trying something!

Very intrigued to see if this works! I am certainly branching out and becoming oh-so-clever with by blogging!!!

Click here to visit a post on Roy and Lynn's blog about digital libraries.

Click here to visit a post on Penny's blog about The Tme Traveller's Wife.

But I don't want to learn a new language!

Have run into a bit of a hitch with the book review idea. To cut a long story short, I have been playing with the html code for the layout of my blog - with no success!

Now since starting this course, I have become MUCH more adventurous when it comes to technology. I'm loving the blogging, and actually felt excited and optimistic about customising my blog to serve a new purpose. But I think I've now hit the wall - of all the many and varied subjects that I'm interested in learning about, html code is NOT one of them! I really can't get enthused about tinkering about behind the scenes of my blog speaking to my computer in a foreign language. In fact, I'm still one of those people who wish voice and language recognition software would progress to the stage where you could yell and swear at your computer and it would understand you!

Anyway, I'm going to have a read through some of my fellow students' blogs to see what's going on for them while I wait to get a reply to my help request from blogger.

Check this out.

Check this out:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123980920727621353.html
courtesy of Pimp My Library (see my blog list).

I've gotta get me one of those Kindle ebook readers!

Techno Savvy

I am much more adventurous when on the computer these days. I used to like to know exactly how to do something before I started. I always wanted to know what was going to happen before I clicked on anything! I didn't want any surprises, or anything that might be hard to undo, or might in some way cause me more time and effort. I didn't like to "fiddle" or "muddle along" or "work it out as I went along".

Now I've realised that it's not too bad to just click and see what happens! You never make a mistake so bad that it can't be fixed, and it's not so scary. I've also used the "help" functions in programs a lot more, and found that most of the time they do help! So I think I'm making good progress. I don't seem to have those moments when I wish my computer could hear me yelling at it anymore!

Finding a needle in a haystack.

Loving this description by Matthew Koll of the approaches to finding information on the Internet:

A known needle in a known haystack
A known needle in an unknown haystack
An unknown needle in an unknown haystack
Any needle in a haystack
The sharpest needle in a haystack
Most of the sharpest needles in a haystack
All the needles in a haystack
Affirmation of no needles in the haystack
Things like needles in any haystack
Let me know whenever a new needle shows up
Where are the haystacks?
Needles, haystacks - whatever (Koll, 1999)

I'd like to add my usual feelings when searching:

Hooray - I found a needle!

As I learn more, I'd like to progress to the stage where I can say:

Not only did I find just the needle I was looking for, I've found several others that are just as sharp and maybe even more useful!

Koll's little poem is sooooo clever and funny, but demonstrates that knowing exactly what you are looking for, and where you expect to find it, is so important.